How often is this sort of thing actually a problem? Are there examples of elections that turned out this way?
* people's sincere preferences
* people's reported preferences in surveys
* people's strategic voting in a hypothetical scenario
* and people's strategic voting in the real world.
I'd argue that an ideal system allows those four to collapse into one, but I'm not holding my breath.
In honesty though, I don't know. I'd assume this type of failure would occur whenever the largest demographic's second choice isn't the first choice of the second largest demographic (read: quite often), but that's armchair guessing.
I'm much more convinced about the argument against complexity, because I don't trust the state government much to design something clear and simple, and it's not yet clear to me that ranked choice is "simple".
I hope they do.
In any case I'm very excited to see what happens.